GROSS UND KLEIN

It takes a moment for the clapping to begin.

Botho Strauss’ Gross und Klein (Big and Small) was first staged in 1978, in divided Germany, and you could guess with some confidence that some of us have read the play in the intervening years and know its final lines.

But when the lines are read and the lights dimmed, it takes a moment for the audience to catch up.

There is a lot to recover from in this odyssey from the tourist traps of Morocco to Saarbrücken and Essen, captained by Cate Blanchett as Lotte.

Over nearly three hours, this production careens from comedy to anguish to deranged optimism; a study in finding oneself on society’s fringes.

We meet Lotte first on a hotel terrace in Agadir, midway through a disastrous holiday. Estranged from her husband, at odds with her tour group, the meaningless business-speak of two strangers pacing on the street below whips her into a frenzy of enthusiasm. She thinks they are philosophers, refined gentlemen who might offer to buy her a drink, take her away from all this. They do not.

It is the first of a few disappointments for Lotte.

She returns home to Germany, where she troops from one old stomping ground to another. An attempt to reconcile with her brutal husband (Robert Menzies) sees her beaten and cast out; her reminisces to an old friend are met with taunts; her family members reject her between drinks.

Ever hopeful, Lotte innocently ploughs on in her search for meaningful connection. She is like the dog that, on being kicked, keeps wagging its tail.

Adapted by British playwright Martin Crimp and directed by Sydney favourite Benedict Andrews, Gross und Klein could play out anywhere. Set designer Johannes Schutz has brilliantly created a world that sits not in Europe but somewhere between nightmare and suburban Anytown: walls shift, ratios skew, shadowy figures linger in the upstage darkness.

Other than a nod to wohngemeinschaft culture when Lotte takes up in her husband’s sharehouse, and the haunting appearance of a Turk (Yalin Ozucelik) barking German words he does not understand, there is little of contemporary Germany here.

Perhaps that is the point. Even if this did feel like Lotte’s native country, even if the actors really were speaking her native German tongue, she would never be at home.

Until Dec 23, Sydney Theatre Company, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $40-130, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au